Most Japanese households still feel economic pressure

Some people saw Japan’s real wages rise for a few months and acted like the problem was solved. May was up 1.4%. Five months of increases in a row. They treated it like the wage story was finally fixed. It’s not. For years Japan’s productivity kept rising while real wages stayed weak. Workers produced more. Companies got more efficient. But the average person’s buying power didn’t move with it. A short streak of better numbers after a long lag doesn’t erase that. Prices are still elevated. Rents in the big cities keep climbing. The weak yen is still making imports more expensive. Most households still feel the squeeze. A few green months look good in a headline. They don’t mean daily life suddenly got easier. The real issue was never one or two monthly reports. It was that productivity gains kept flowing more to the system than to the people living in it. A short recovery doesn’t close that gap.